


Reflection of Sorrow

by glitterpop



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Sad Ending, Self-Harm, hidashi can be read into this if you want it to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3234788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterpop/pseuds/glitterpop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loss is harder to cope with if the one grieving doesn't want to move on</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflection of Sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so this is a different style than usual. Because for one, there is NO HORROR OR GORE IN THIS. Oh my, no one thought I was capable of it, huh? Two, because I wrote it like I usually write my poetry, which is long-winded and kinda flowery. Three, because there's NO ACTUAL DIALOGUE and there's no real reference over whose perspective is actually being written. It's obviously the Hamada brothers, but who died? Who is still alive?
> 
> I don't know, and I don't tell you guys. But I know y'all will come up with your own ideas of who it is, and what's happening in the story. Y'all are creative, which is part of the reason I love all of you so much~
> 
> With that said, like it says in the tag THERE IS A SMALL SCENE OF SELF-HARM IN THIS, but it's not graphic, and it's very brief
> 
> I hope you guys enjoy~~~

Waking up slowly, feeling like he’s swimming through a sea of sludge, he tries to breathe through the grief clogging his throat. He tries to breathe, but his face is buried in his pillow and his heart is burned to ash, and it would be easier to live than breathe through all this. It would be easier, but he would have to face the crumpled faces of those whose throats are also grief-clogged, who wear their burned hearts on the outside, hoping it will harden and heal the battered organ.

It is easiest to lay here and suffocate.

Time passes, and he doesn’t measure the seconds, only the way his chest rises and falls. He wishes it would stop, that his chest will fall and stay down, because then he could close his eyes and never have to worry about how he would ever get through the next day. Never have to wonder why he gets another day, and not his brother, who deserved it much more. His brother, who has a grave that lays empty in a cemetery full of people who don’t worry about the hearts they have broken, who was burned alive in a fire that no one could stop.

He remembers standing outside the building, holding discarded clothing, watching the firefighters give up on putting out the blaze. Watching them focus on containment instead. He remembers their grim faces, the anguished wailing of his aunt, who had now lost even more family. He remembers the way the firelight flickered across drawn, pale faces, who had cried silently and together.

He remembers the slow, sure feeling of unraveling from the bottom up. How his toes had started to feel disconnected and loose, flowing up the arches of his feet, taking away his ankles and forcing him to float through the funeral, the grieving he couldn’t share in because he grieved _more,_ he had lost so much more than any of them. Lying in bed now, waking from a nightmare of darkness with just one, small voice calling out his name over and over and over, he can feel his knees start to unravel as well.

Such a slow process, being unmade from everything you were and loved before.

He opens his mouth, intending to scream even though it will bring unwanted company to his room so late at night, but all that comes out is a hoarse sob. He cries a lot these days, unsure what else to do. Talk, he’d been told so often to talk and share in the memories closest to him, it would help with healing they all told him.

Talk, they eventually pleaded with him, when weeks had passed but all that would come out of him were sobs and screams. Say something, say anything, but how could he? What was the point in saying anything if the only person he wanted to talk to couldn’t hear him? He’s not really gone, they tried to tell him. Keep him in your thoughts and heart, and he’ll be with you forever.

There was no one breathing on the other side of the room though. There was no one to poke awake after bad dreams, who could make bad jokes and funny faces until he felt silly for ever being scared. There was no one down in the garage, tinkering away at projects they wouldn’t tell him about, _it’s not ready yet!_ There was no one in the café, or messaging him on his phone, or making sure he ate at regular times.

No one that meant anything.

He feels his chest rise and fall and closes his eyes. He won’t sleep again, not after his dream, but maybe some rest… Maybe something, maybe anything to escape whatever reality had been forced upon him. Maybe only a lifetime left before he can deal with this.

And maybe he does doze off, because he dreams of cold, cold fingers running through his hair and he doesn’t want to move away from them.

-

The thing about not talking, he discovers one day, is that the people around you assume you are also not listening to them.

Doctors, his aunt brings up to those he had called friends briefly, only briefly, because life seemed to only be a brief thing now. Doctors, she mutters through a downturned mouth, to maybe get him talking again. Medicine, they suggest with downturned mouths and hopeful eyes. They are still grieving for their loss, but beginning to move on. They had a life outside his brother, but he never had that. His brother was his life, all he knew, and now they wanted to take that from him.

Doctors, just to help him cope, and this time when he opened his mouth a scream did come out.

He screamed and screamed and smacked away any hands that came close to him. They couldn’t touch him, they couldn’t even _think_ about touching him. They wanted to take his brother away, they wanted to take away all he had left, because they had moved on without him. They didn’t understand that he couldn’t leave his brother, no matter how little was left. He had promised, they had promised each other to always protect each other, and if this was all he had then he would protect it with his dying breath. Even if it was what would kill him in the end.

Eventually the hands stopped touching, and eventually his throat was too raw to scream any longer. He sat huddled around himself when that time came, hitching breaths shaking his body. No one was there, and he was so tired. All the time tired, wanting to just sleep the rest of his life away and wake up to his brother’s smiling eyes, the only thing worth waking up for.

He felt a touch of cold brush against his fingertips, tentative and fleeting, before it slowly crept up his hands. The cold twisted around and touched the inside of his wrists and further up his arms. He shuddered and gasped but didn’t move. Only lifted his head, even though there was nothing around him, and waited.

The cold felt like fingers and he _wanted._

Up his arms, around his collarbones, the cold drifted steadily up and up. He breathed out shakily when it touched lightly against his throat, circling around it briefly. It finally touched his face, and it chilled his face where tears he hadn’t even noticed had started to fall. It felt like it was trying to wipe them away, and he tried to smile even though it didn’t work. Tried to, but found he couldn’t remember how to work those muscles anymore.

He closes his eyes and sighs the name that has been haunting him at night.

-

He’s cold all the time now, cold through his skin down to his veins, cold in his heart. He’s bitterly cold but he feels like his soul is on fire. He sees his aunt watching him carefully, wonderingly, as he wanders the house in a daze. He knows she turns up the heat when he rubs his arms, but it does no good. The cold is coming from inside him, around him. It’s a cold that she can’t feel, and he’s grateful for that in a way he can’t describe.

The cold makes him ache, though, and sometimes when he wakes up he feels as if his joints have been frozen solid. It always takes so long to feel like he can move, it always feels like he shouldn’t be able to. He can, though, he always can, and it always makes him cry that the only one who knows it’s there is him.

He’s in the kitchen, one morning, not quite sure how he got there. He’s always so focused on trying to discern where the stronger points of cold are on his body now, and he can’t do that and focus on where his feet are taking him. Best to focus on what’s more important. He finds himself in the kitchen, standing and staring at the stove. There’s a tea kettle on, steaming, close to shrieking its mad tune to let the world know that it’s burning now, too hot, so hot. He can’t remember what being hot feels like anymore.

He’s staring at the stove, at the tea kettle, and he sees a body standing next to him in the metal of it.

His breath hitches harshly, and he almost chokes. He knows that body, he does, he knows it, even though it’s been so long. Even though the reflection is nothing but a blurred mess next to his clear one. He’s too shocked, too cold and numb to cry, but his brother is standing next to him after months of being gone and it’s just too much. He’s so close, and he’s so cold, and he can’t turn because if he does then his brother won’t be there anymore.

He has to do something though, he thinks, listening to the kettle start to wail.

Slowly, never taking his eyes off his most precious person, he takes the kettle away from the burner and replaces its presence with his own hand. He almost jerks it away, the sharp punch of heat almost too much after days of frostbite. He can’t though, he _can’t,_ not when he sees his brother reach out and cover his hand with both his own. He stares at the reflection of their hands, and doesn’t even feel the heat anymore. He stares transfixed at the proof of his brother, proof that he was still with him, until he hears a piercing, panicked yell behind him.

His aunt cries as she treats the burnt and bubbling flesh of his palm, and he cries too, ignorant of the pain.

-

He looks now and sees the reflection of his brother everywhere. Faintly in the window, blurred on reflective surfaces. It’s only clear in mirrors, and that’s where he spends most of his time now. He spends hours in the bathroom, tracing the curve of a jaw he can’t actually touch.

He’s sitting in his room, staring at the black screen of the computer monitor, staring at his brothers arms wrapped around his shoulders. His mouth is by his ear, and if he concentrates hard enough he imagines he can feel lips form words against the upper curve of it. He reads his brother’s lips in the monitor, feeling his face go numb and wishing he could touch as well. He watches his brother say the same three words over and over and imagines touching his brother, relearning a body that has started going fuzzy and soft in his mind.

I miss you, he wants to say, but he can’t remember how to form the words between his teeth.

-

Your friends miss you, his aunt says slowly from the doorway. He looks over his shoulder at her blankly, wondering why those words couldn’t make him feel anything. The sun is shining in through the windows, and he’s sitting in front of the floor length mirror in the living room. He doesn’t know how long he’s been there, but his aunt’s eyes are red and puffy, and he thinks it’s been a while. A while but not long enough, not long enough to have memorized every last inch of his brother’s faint smiles.

Your friends miss you, she had said, and he could hear the I miss you hidden under her words, but he couldn’t feel anything for them.

They miss you, and it’s such a lovely day, and maybe you should go to school, she says through a smile she forces to her lips. And yes, he could go to school, to where his brother died so violently, and he could see his friends, who had his brother’s name etched into their eyes. And he could go and see his brother in every mirror there, every metal surface.

He could go to school.

Please, his aunt whispers, tears trickling down to the smile that she can’t seem to banish. Please, it’s been so long, go to school, go outside, do something, say something, say anything, please I love you.

He imagines it in his head. He imagines standing up, going and wrapping his arms around his aunt, the tearful reunion when he said his first word in months. He imagined the love and hope in her eyes as he stepped outside, the joy on his friends faces when they saw him. He imagined school, the things he could learn, the things he could do. He imagines learning to smile again, learning to sleep through the dreams that would come less and less frequently. He imagines learning how to live again as he had before, just one day at a time until the last day came, who would know when?

He imagines doing all of these things, but he’s so cold, and so lost, and he had felt his heart unravel already. He’d been unraveling since day one, and he had finally lost his heart when he had dreamed that his brother opened his mouth and his tongue was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers. He dreamed his brother’s mouth had been on fire and he dreamed that he had forgotten how to scream, and he’d woken up feeling his chest had gone empty.

His brother is dead and right now is the closest he’s felt to being there with him since.

He turns blank eyes back to the mirror and can’t hear his aunt start to cry over the brilliance of his brother’s grin.

**Author's Note:**

> [If you guys wanna share your thoughts over what's happening here, you can find me here~](http://www.glitterpukesoul.tumblr.com)


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